Appearing before a small gaggle of reporters drawn exclusively from Fox, Breitbart, Stormfront, and Sputnik, Sheets played surveillance footage that seemed to show Charlie Brown, the ceaselessly morose round-headed child who dresses worse than even Bill Belichick, entering a Christmas-tree lot, there selecting a small tree, and then leaving the lot without paying for it.

“You see?” Sheets crowed. “He’s a thief! Open and shut.”

Sheets said that after Brown was arrested and booked, a DNA sample was extracted from the child, “which proves conclusively that—pursuant to the one-drop rule, which, came January 20, again became the law of this land, thanks be to Jesus—this wanton tree-thieving criminal is a Negro.”

“Of course,” Sheets continued, “we knew that as soon as we saw him steal the tree. Because those who Make America Great Again, they do not steal trees. That’s Negroid behavior.”

“You see that dog?” rumbled Sheets. “Nigras—I mean dogs—have no business on the ice. And his outrageous, unprovoked assault on those children? That animal needs to be put down!”

Sheets said that DNA testing had affirmed that the dog, known as Snoopy, is, like Brown, “of the Negroid persuasion.”

“Peanuts gang” member Lucy Van Pelt was arrested on charges of practicing psychiatry without a license, Sheets said, while her brother, Linus, was charged with “flagrant homoism.”

“Homoism,” Sheets explained, “is well-known as a subset of Negritude.”

Sheets then produced surveillance footage of what he described as “a Negrified dance orgy.”

“A warrant is out for the arrest of that Negroist piano-player,” Sheets announced. “We are combing every hill and dale. We believe his name is Schroeder. We know that he had no proper permits for holding that Negroid jazz frenzy in such a cramped and confined space. The whole place could easily have gone up in flames, like in that Ghost Ship fire, that cooked all those queers and coloreds.”

Sheets said the child who is the bassist in the above “dance orgy” had been taken into protective custody. “He is known only as ‘Pigpen,'” Sheets explained. “His parents did not even give him a proper name. They allowed him to live in conditions of such squalor and filth that the State has taken possession of him, for his own safety and well-being.”

Sheets said “Pigpen” has been given a new name—Nathan Bedford Forrest—and added that “once the poor boy is cleaned up, he will be immediately enlisted in the Marines, so he can learn how to hunt Negroes, grease Muslims, and shoot Mexicans in the desert. He’s gonna be an American.”

Sheets next happily shared with those assembled some pictures of his slaves.

Asked why he persisted in referring to himself as “Confederate General,” rather than “Attorney General,” Sheets explained that “Mongo has changed the title from ‘Attorney General,’ to ‘Confederate General,’ in order to help heal the country’s divisions.”

Sheets then played for the reporters what he described as the “new anthem” of his department. Rendered, there, below.

Don’t think that life is somewhere over the rainbow. What you’ve got right now, with your family, your friends, your house: this might be as good as life is ever going to be. Life is not happening on the other side of the rainbow. We are on the other side of the rainbow.

I was leaving to go to work and she woke up before I left and I’ve actually been teaching her Portuguese and so our last conversation was in Portuguese. And she told me good morning and asked how I was doing. And I said that I was doing well. She said that she loved me and I gave her a kiss and I was out the door.

I’m not mad. Because I have my agency to make sure that I use this event to do what I can, to do whatever I can. I want to make sure that my family, my wife and my daughters, are taken care of, and that, if there is anything I can do to help anybody, at any time, anywhere, I’d be willing to do that.

All the guns are gone. They became gone when the Americans understood that they didn’t want to live in fear anymore. When they understood that fear is over. That it is no longer necessary. That it is a product of the lizard brain. That the brain is bigger than that now. That the lizard brain peaked hundreds of millions of years ago. That its day: it is done.

The guns gone even from the police. When Jerry Brown was governor of California there the first time, sometimes Ken Kesey would wander down from Oregon, stop in at the state capitol, and there hold forth to whoever might be around. Once he held forth on how the police needed to “lay the gun down”; they would never be accepted as part of the community, he said, could never do their job, until they did. Brown himself at one point strolled in, listened a bit, then scoffed: “It’s not going to happen. The police are not going to lay down their guns. Let’s talk about something Real.” Kesey smiled, and then he said: “Oh, but it is Real.” And he was right. We are in that Real now.

There are no guns in the nation’s military. And the nation doesn’t have a military. America is at peace with its neighbors, Canada and Mexico. And so, no military is necessary.

There is one gun left among the Americans. It is in a museum. People come by, and they look at it, and they wonder: what were they thinking?

Connecticut is reaching out to other states to help with autopsies because they don’t have enough medical examiners.

There was no shortage of people with guns arriving on the scene. There never was. But for healers, Connecticut had to go out of state.

And I thought: that is precisely the opposite of the way it should be. Always, there should be a surfeit of healers, always on hand. But for guns, a call must go out, to bring them in, from far and far and far away—ten thousand leagues, beyond, the wide world’s end. Because the age of the warrior, it is over. We’re in the era of healers now.

All the guns were gone that day the children of Newtown died. Everyone knew it then. It just took some a while longer to accept it. Because children, they are like Christmas lights. Soft and warm and glowing; never to be broken. And they are like that all of their lives. Because there is no such thing as a grownup.

After 113 years defiantly facing Union Avenue, the statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest was pulled from its pedestal at exactly 9:01 p.m. on Wednesday night.

Secured with straps—let’s call them shackles, with Forrest finally on the receiving end—it swayed under trees for a delicate seven-minute journey to the back of a flatbed truck, whose company information had been covered in tape, a clandestine precaution.

A little less than an hour later, covered by a blue hood and standing upright, Forrest made his last ride to parts unknown, down a street representing that which he once sought to destroy. Once again, Union had prevailed.

This happened because people mandated it and wanted it. Take ‘Em Down 901 is now Took ‘Em Down 901. Those two symbols of white supremacy stunk up Memphis’s parks for TOO LONG. And as of 9:01 last night, they were finally moved. My hometown has never looked better.

It’s important to know why we’re here: The Forrest statue was placed in 1904, as Jim Crow segregation laws were enacted. The Davis statue was placed in 1964, as the Civil Rights Movement changed our country. The statues no longer represent who we are.

In the days after the August events in Charlottesville, we saw an avalanche of support come together behind our efforts. So it’s important that we not forget the sea change that made today a reality: Republicans and Democrats, a unanimous city and county government, Gov. Haslam, scores of diverse members of the clergy, prominent members of the business community, and citizen demonstrators came together to support the same cause.

In all of my life in Memphis, I’ve never seen such solidarity. To all who have joined the effort: THANK YOU.

There were times when he was capable of rejoicing in himself as a singularity—a man without a story, secure from tribal delusion, able to see the many levels. But at other times he felt that he might give anything to be able to explain himself. To call himself Jew or Greek, Gentile or otherwise, the citizen of no mean city. But he had no recourse except to call himself an American and hence the slave of possibility. He was not always up for the necessary degree of self-invention, unprepared, occasionally, to assemble himself.

And sometimes the entire field of folk seemed alien and hostile, driven by rages he could not comprehend, drunk on hopes he could not imagine. So he could make his way only through questioning, forever inquiring of wild-eyed obsessives the nature of their dreams, their assessment of themselves and their enemies, listening agreeably while they poured scorn on his ignorance and explained the all too obvious. When he wrote, it was for some reader like himself, a bastard, party to no covenants, promised nothing except the certainty of silence overhead, darkness around. Sometimes he had to face the simple fact that he had nothing and no one and try to remember when that had seemed a source of strength and perverse pride. Sometimes it came back for him.